I can’t speak to Australia’s racism, but America’s isn’t doing great. Some of us are hopeful, though- it feels worse now than it ever has been in my lifetime, but part of that is because we’re openly talking about it. Solutions only come after discussions, and so we could be having a darker-before-the-dawn moment. I wonder if something similar is happening in Australia?

Deaths may well have reduced relative to population size but I wonder how much of that is due to the changed nature of battle as compared with even World War II, let alone the thousands of years before then, when most combat was hand to hand and didn’t allow the “stand off and destroy” approach of modern warfare.

Honestly, I would give more credit here to battlefield medicine and medicine in general, as well as the nature of warfare. On the medicine side of things, the inclusion of training in things like the treatment of collapsed lungs from chest injuries has saved many lives. More effective responses to bleeding out have also greatly improved survivability on the battlefield.

Second, as our weapons have gotten more destructive, armies have become more hidden. In the World Wars, we fought in trenches, which provided cover from explosives. In Vietnam and Afghanistan, tunnels were the next logical step from trenches, and dramatically reduced the efficacy of bombs. Now, most conflicts are fought in small squads, a far cry from the columns of thousands in Napoleonic wars.

But those factors wouldn’t affect the civilian death toll much. Civilian medicine has greatly improved, and injuries which would have resulted in death decades ago are now treated. Honestly, I think the horrors of WWII helped codify the rest of the world’s response to civilian casualties. This has led to strong measures reining in civilian deaths. Now whether this helps your case or the original author’s, I don’t know.

I also wonder whether the number of deaths, tragic as death is, really gives any semblance of understanding of the tragedy and issues for those who are injured or have to pick up the pieces or live in the ruins left behind. Does it matter that only 2,000 people die rather than 10,000 when many who survive are badly injured, and their hospitals, homes, schools and infrastructure is in ruins?

This one is hard to answer- much of the infrastructure that would have been destroyed in a previous time would have been vastly different from the infrastructure that gets destroyed. I would point out that infrastructure can be repaired, and even people with terrible injuries can frequently have a relatively high quality of life, again because of advances in medicine. And while yes, I get that much of this argument applies less in the developing world, most of the developed world is still eager to help.

Still, does the metric of total deaths accurately account for those things? No, but I tend to think of it as a lower bound on suffering. It’s not going to be a perfect correlation, but it seems like it would be reasonable to assert that if 10000 were killed instead of 2000 killed and 8000 injured, there would still be similar suffering among the survivors, ie., infrastructure damaged, lives ruined. But there would be 8000 fewer injured people to help with the rebuilding, to find new or reclaim old purpose.